Did DeLong perhaps conflate RealClimate with RealClear*?
They are a rather different and this raises the question: how did this happen to get written? Most
people who've heard of RealClimate know what it is and don't confuse it with the others.

**Live from La Farine:** After thinking: This didn't say what I wanted it to say, and what I wanted it to say wasn't the point I should have been making. So this is staying down. Apologies to all... [Let me take this down while I think about this some more...]

Has this account been hacked to inject a defamatory accusation against some very good climate scientists who also take the time to explain science? (Speaking as an AGU Member who was at Gavin's table when he got an AGU award a few years ago, and sat next to Ray Pierrehumbert, etc.)
Wearing my computer scientist hat, I suggest that people whose focus is on creating good content, and may even be good programmers (as some them are), quite easily are not network systems administrators, and in the Internet era, it is all too easy for things to get messed up in odd ways with multiple organizations like this. Fault isolation and repair is nontrivial unless you do a lot of it.

**Live from La Farine:** After thinking: This didn't say what I wanted it to say, and what I wanted it to say wasn't the point I should have been making. So this is staying down. Apologies to all... [Let me take this down while I think about this some more...]

Say some more about why the marriage is pending.
Is that change of definitions, as some of this is pretty old.
I was at Bell Labs in the 1970s/early 1980s, and Murray Hill Bldg 5 had statisticians who spent their time analyzing telephone records whose volumes certainly fit Big Data for the time, even if it wasn't called that. The Bell System tracked every trouble report, down to thing like squirrel bites and gunshots, and later we did expert systems for rummaging the data and looking for patterns.
In the 1990s, Silicon Graphics was selling supercomputers to telcos and others, both for marketing analytics and fraud detection, both of which needed much statistical analysis.
For some history, see:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/the-origins-of-big-data-an-etymological-detective-story/?_r=0
http://www.slideshare.net/amhey/big-data-yesterday-today-and-tomorrow-by-john-mashey-techviser?utm_source=slideshow03&utm_medium=ssemail&utm_campaign=share_slideshow
See especially slides 22-24.

The current issue of Significance includes an article by me on the "pending marriage between statistics and Big Data". If you are a member of either the American Statistical Association or the Royal Statistical Society, you should be able to access the article via this link. If you don't belong ...